When it comes to expanding your dental practice’s online presence, prioritizing your website is of utmost importance. Your website should go beyond merely providing contact information and showcasing your services. It should be strategically optimized to rank well on search engines and local search results, resulting in a remarkable return on investment (ROI). As demonstrated in this case study – Huge ROI on SEO – a great SEO strategy for dentists can lead to an insane ROI by driving substantial organic traffic to your practice’s website. By implementing effective SEO techniques, you can enhance your credibility among search engines and potential patients, ultimately fueling your practice’s growth. By implementing a comprehensive SEO plan, Romain Berg can improve your website’s search engine rankings, focusing on relevant keywords, creating engaging content, and optimizing technical aspects. As a result, you will experience a significant boost in organic traffic and a substantial increase in patient inquiries. Our approach to dental SEO goes beyond just keyword optimization. We understand the importance of creating a seamless user experience, optimizing website structure, and leveraging local search features to enhance your practice’s online visibility. We recognize that, as a dentist, you have more important things to focus on than digital marketing. That’s why partnering with Romain Berg for your SEO needs is the best decision you can make. Our dedicated professionals will handle all aspects of your dental practice’s marketing, allowing you to concentrate on providing exceptional care to your patients. Don’t miss out on the immense benefits of SEO for your dental practice. Contact us today, and let us help you strengthen your online presence, attract more patients, and achieve sustainable growth.  

How Does Search Engine Optimization Work?

A search engine wants to find the most satisfying answer to any query that comes its way. So it sends bots called “crawlers” to skim through websites and find a relevant answer to what the user is asking. Once it finds what it’s looking for on several websites, it indexes each page’s contents and ranks the results according to how relevant, recent, or optimized the answer is to the query. Search engine optimization is the practice of making your website easily reachable to search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and others. The specific algorithm with which search engines rank results isn’t public knowledge, but that doesn’t mean professionals don’t know how it works! Optimizing content on your website to match the ideal answer to many of the users’ queries is the first SEO tactic. Some other behind-the-scenes steps make your website more likely to appear on the first search engine results page (SERP). We’ll discuss them in detail below.  

What Does Local SEO Do for Dentists?

    In today’s digital landscape, businesses heavily rely on traffic from search engines like Google to reach potential customers. When people are in need of a particular service or product, they often turn to search engines and select one of the top options displayed on the search results page. In fact, the first organic result, which is not a paid advertisement, receives the majority of the traffic on a given page. The second result closely follows, while paid ads typically rank lower in visibility. This phenomenon is driven by search engine crawlers that analyze the relevance of each result to the user’s query and elevate those that closely match the search intent. The goal is to ensure highly visible placement for the most relevant and trustworthy options. Implementing local SEO strategies on your website can significantly enhance its discoverability by search engine crawlers. By optimizing your website with valuable and location-specific information, you significantly increase your chances of appearing among the top results that users trust and click on. This process creates a feedback loop: the more users click on a particular result, the higher it climbs in the website list, increasing its visibility to even more users who are likely to click on it. Statistics further demonstrate the impact of search engine rankings on user behavior. Research shows that the first organic search result receives approximately 30% of the total clicks, while the second result receives around 15%. As the ranking position decreases, the click-through rates decline significantly. Paid ads, although still valuable, tend to attract a smaller percentage of clicks compared to organic results.  

How to Make the Most of Local SEO for Dentists

    By strategically implementing local SEO techniques, you can position your dental practice among the top results that users trust and click on. This not only boosts your online visibility and credibility but also drives a substantial increase in website traffic and potential patient inquiries, ultimately leading to a remarkable return on investment (ROI). Investing in an effective SEO strategy tailored to the unique needs of dental practices can yield impressive returns. Studies have shown that businesses that prioritize SEO and achieve higher rankings in search engine results experience significant growth in organic traffic and conversions. By partnering with experienced professionals like Romain Berg, who specializes in SEO, you can unlock the full potential of search engine optimization and achieve exceptional results for your practice, including a substantial ROI. Remember, the higher your website ranks in search engine results, the more users will discover and choose your dental practice, resulting in increased website traffic, patient trust, and business growth. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to leverage the power of SEO to maximize your practice’s ROI. So, how do you get started? Local SEO tactics are divided into three categories:

• Technical SEO,
• On-page SEO,
• Off-page SEO

Let’s break each one of them down and see how it affects your website.  

Technical SEO

As a dentist, you’re familiar with the concept that aesthetics don’t always mean healthy. Many people have perfectly veneered teeth but are in dire need of a diagnostic checkup. When it comes to websites, the same is true. A website that looks fine could be suffering from technical issues that impede functionality and negatively affect its ranking. However, the issues that lie underneath the surface aren’t easy to detect by the human eye. Search engines are good at knowing when something is wrong because they rely on high-speed spiders (crawlers) that gather information from the website. These can detect issues with the following:

• Slow initial response time
• Loading speed
• HREFLANG tags, canonical tags, and meta tags
• Site design
• Orphan pages
• Mobile-friendliness
• Schema and structured data
• Unexpected visual shifts

The more problems a crawler finds with your website, the less likely it is to recommend it to users. If the issues are so pervasive they make the website unreadable, it might not even rank on any of the SERPs for related queries. All is not lost, though. Working with a marketing team with a website design background could eliminate these problems. A web developer can diagnose and treat root issues affecting website health. Unless you also dabble in coding and want to take on this project, which is too time-consuming to be of any reward.  

On-Page SEO

When most people hear the words “search engine optimization,” their minds usually jump to this specific type of SEO. The original content and copy you find on the pages of the website make a huge difference in how high it ranks on SERPs. Google has a guide on what its crawlers think is helpful content and are more likely to recommend it to users. The aim here is to provide an answer to users’ questions without pandering to the bots, which is how a website is flagged as spam. It’s not as simple as making a few pages about how great your practice is, though. Your website will benefit from having multiple pages of well-researched, highly-optimized dental content. Think of it as a chance to give credibility to your work as a dentist. Prospective patients and clients will regard you as an authority figure they can trust with their health if the content of your website leads them to believe it. How can you do that, though? Writing blog content that targets keywords related to dentistry is a solid way to start. You’re basically answering people’s most-asked questions and driving traffic to your website where they can check out your services. Here are a few helpful tips for on-page SEO:

1. Choose the right seed keyword for your blog posts and avoid vague keywords which have millions of search results. These are impossible to rank on because somebody got there first.
2. Fill gaps on your website with information that relates to your branch of dentistry, whether you’re an orthodontist, prosthodontist, oral surgeon, or general dentist.
3. Choose relevant titles for your blog posts that are likely to get a reaction.
4. Get right to the point of the post and answer questions without too many anecdotes and indirect language.
5. Use multimedia such as photos, videos, and charts to enhance the visibility and richness of your content. Recently, Google’s Multitask Unified Model (MUM) has been updated to become multimodal, allowing it to interpret information not only from text but also from images and videos.

Off-Page SEO

    SEO doesn’t only happen on your website. You could have a perfectly optimized website and still struggle with conversion rates of clicks to paying customers. A huge portion of how patients and clients discover your dental practice is due to off-page SEO efforts. Making sure your website has a valid online presence outside of its content can make or break your chances of getting leads. Off-page SEO relies on the following:

• Google Business Profile (GBP)
• Online directories
• Backlinks
• Social media
• Reviews

Let’s break this down further.

Google Business Profile (GBP)

When you search for a “dentist near me,” Google gives you a list of dental practices that fall within your broad geographical location, called a local pack. Click on any of the results, and a business profile comes up. The first and most important information provided here is the name, address, and phone number, called NAP. This is what your potential client is looking for when they click on your profile link. Claiming your business profile and doing a bit of housekeeping there can do wonders for your conversion rates. Having a clear connection between your highly-optimized website and GBP can give you way more leads. Another trick you can try on your GBP is to add product listings that include keywords you want to rank for. Consider “teeth whitening” or “oral hygiene checkup” as options to include, leading searchers to your GBP and dental practice.

Online Directories

Other than GBP, you have other online directories like YellowPages that list businesses and their NAP. They usually allow random users to add information even if they have no relation to the business, with no fact-checking to allow for the biggest number of entries possible. Well, sometimes, this leads to the name of your business being associated with the wrong address or phone number. For someone who wants successful leads, this is disastrous. Going over these directories, editing NAP information, and linking to your website (if that’s allowed) can help you get many more clicks on your website and calls on the phone.

Backlinks

Backlinks are links that lead from one website to a different domain within a certain context. Google crawlers view backlinks as a virtual “thumbs up” that shows a certain domain has credibility and is worth checking out. It’s an endorsement of the website’s content in a social sense. That said, not all backlinks are created equal. When a high-quality domain links back to your website, this means the content on your website is of equal or higher quality. Although domain names with .gov, .org, and .edu are often associated with high-quality sites, the backlinks should be based on the authority and relevance of the linking website rather than its domain. If you go about the backlink route by paying for random websites to mention yours, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Google views low-ranking domains with a suspicious eye, always worried they’re spamming users with low-quality content and backlinks. This leads to crawlers marking any associated websites as spam, going as far as banishing them from SERPs. You wouldn’t want that for the website you worked so hard to build and optimize! You can get backlinks by publishing original content that other websites would want to link to. Research and studies form a good portion of credible backlinks and press releases about new treatment protocols you might have come up with. You can also reach out to other domains with a similar niche, i.e., dentistry, and offer blurbs or excerpts they can use in exchange for backlinks. All of this makes your website even more credible to both the bots and the users.

Social Media

Social media has become an essential part of the online experience for most people. Instead of Googling something, you might search for it on Facebook or even TikTok to see what other users say about it. Setting up a Facebook business page and having other social media accounts where you post regularly can help you get more leads from these corners of the internet. Just make sure you link to your website and keep the information on the page updated. A few sponsored posts on Facebook won’t hurt, either.

Reviews

Reading Yelp or Google reviews is now some kind of ritual that customers perform before they decide to give their money or time to any service provider. Google also prioritizes businesses with good reviews as a metric for how high to rank them. As a dentist, you have a golden opportunity to get your clients and patients to support you by leaving reviews with very little incentivization. If you have a mailing list, send out emails asking for reviews of your services and location(s) in exchange for a discount on the client’s next visit. If not, you can leave out a tablet at your receptionist’s desk where clients can leave a review as they’re leaving. This is a win-win situation where your clients benefit from reduced fees, and you get the good word out of how great your services are. Just avoid language like “leave a good review” and “spread the word” in your emails, as this is considered a manipulative marketing tactic.  

How Do I Know If My SEO Is Working?

    Investing in a solid marketing strategy means that you’ll want to see results as soon as possible. However, unlike pay-per-click ads, where you see a short-term outcome, SEO gives slow and steady results. While it is commonly believed that most SEO strategies yield results within 4-6 months of implementation, it’s important to recognize that results can vary greatly depending on factors such as competition, website condition, and strategy effectiveness. While Google Analytics can help track the effectiveness of SEO efforts, it’s crucial to set realistic expectations and understand that SEO is a long-term process with no guarantee of immediate results. Helpful software, such as CallTrackingMetrics, can integrate with Google Analytics easily, allowing you to see in numbers where you get the most leads that change to texts and calls. This should help you optimize the rest of your website with contact links.  

Frequently Asked Questions

Why Is SEO Important for Dentists?

Like any other service provider, dentists have much to earn from SEO. Stronger visibility, a higher number of leads, and better conversion rates can all result from having your online presence optimized and ready for new clients and patients.

What Should a Dental Website Include?

A dental website should include the following:

• A homepage with the business name and specialty
• An “About” page with the name, address(es), phone number(s), and locations
• A calendar page to check available appointments
• A services page for available services
• A blog section for dental blog posts and answering patients’ questions

What Colors Are Best for Dental Websites?

Most medical websites lean heavily on the color blue because of its association with purity, serenity, and cleanliness. Other colors that also work well are shades of mint green, teal, and light green. Colors to avoid would be red, orange, and yellow. These are some general guidelines for color selection; however, it is important to remember that the choice of colors should also be based on the target audience, brand identity, and personal preferences of the business owner.  

Should I Handle My Own Dental SEO?

The short answer is no. SEO is the key to unlocking exponential growth and attracting a steady stream of new patients. When you rank higher in search engine results, your practice becomes more visible to potential clients actively seeking dental services. By leveraging the power of SEO, you can effectively target your local audience and establish your practice as the go-to dental solution in your area. Online marketing is as highly-specialized as dentistry when it comes to its techniques and advancements. Algorithms change almost overnight, and with them, the tactics that help you stay visible online. When you outsource your SEO and marketing strategies, you can stay focused on providing your patients and clients with the best dental care they can get. Don’t let your competitors outshine you online! Contact Romain Berg today, where our dedicated team is committed to ensuring the rapid growth of your business. With our expertise, we’ll not only boost your online presence but also optimize your offline marketing efforts for maximum results. Visit our website now to discover how Romain Berg can revolutionize your dental practice. Say goodbye to empty promises and embrace tangible outcomes. Experience the true power of SEO for dentists with Romain Berg – your gateway to online success!   About the author:

Sam’s expertise in the field of digital marketing alongside his magnetic charm in the realms of agriculture and ranching has earned him the nickname “Digital Cowboy.”